Commercial plumbing in the San Fernando Valley
Commercial work in the Valley comes down to a handful of property types: restaurants and commercial kitchens, apartment and condo buildings, retail tenants in strip centers and older commercial blocks, and suites for doctors, dentists and other professionals. The jobs range from jetting kitchen lines and setting pumping intervals for grease interceptors to repairing and replacing backflow assemblies, swapping commercial water heaters, tracing leaks inside walls and slabs, repiping, changing fixtures and replacing sewer laterals. Every one of those jobs falls under our California C-36 Plumbing license, #1131308, which carries a $25,000 contractor bond.
Fat from a fryer and a dish sink leaves the kitchen warm and runny. A few yards down the pipe it cools, turns waxy and sticks to the wall, and every busy night adds another coat. A cable bores a path through the middle and leaves the rest of that coating behind, so the drain chokes again a few weeks later. Jetting with high-pressure water strips the pipe back to its full bore. If a line keeps coming back, a camera run comes before the quote, so you can see whether the enemy is grease, a sag in the pipe or a cracked joint. The interceptor deserves as much attention as the pipe. When it is overdue for pumping, grease slips past it and coats your own lateral before it ever reaches the public sewer, which LA Sanitation runs inside the city and the County Sewer Maintenance District looks after in Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Westlake Village, Hidden Hills and Santa Clarita.
Almost every commercial property also has a backflow assembly somewhere: a set of check valves that stops water from a fire sprinkler line, an irrigation system, a boiler or a soda machine from running backward into the public main. Since July 1, 2024 a state handbook has required a certified tester to check each one at least once a year, and LADWP's rules say the same inside the city. Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Westlake Village and Hidden Hills, wants a test at installation and every year after, with results due within 10 business days. When an assembly fails, the plumbing side is ours: we rebuild the check valves and the relief valve, replace an assembly that is past saving, and pull the permit for a new one, which inside the city is an LADBS Express Permit on mains of 1-1/2 inches or less.
Commercial properties we serve in the Valley
- Restaurants, bakeries, cafes and other commercial kitchens
- Owners and managers of apartment buildings, from two-story walk-ups to mid-rise blocks
- Retail tenants in strip centers and older commercial blocks
- Medical, dental and professional suites
- Condo and homeowner associations that maintain common plumbing
- Builders wrapping up a tenant improvement that still needs its plumbing inspected
Warning signs at a commercial property
- A kitchen drain that clogs again not long after it was cleared
- Floor sinks that keep standing water after the dish machine drains
- A grease interceptor with no pumping log anyone can find
- Hot water that gives out before the closing shift is done
- A backflow test that is overdue, or one the assembly failed
- A water bill that keeps climbing while the business runs the same as ever
Scheduled around your business hours
Nobody wants a jetter hose snaking past the line in the middle of a dinner rush, so planned work goes on the calendar for hours when the dining room is empty: early morning, after the final seating, or a day you never open. Apartment residents get written notice before the water goes off, so nobody is caught with a head full of shampoo. A breakdown does not wait for a convenient hour, which is why our 24-hour emergency response runs every night, weekend and holiday. A person answers the phone at any hour.
The paperwork does not change with the clock. The price is on paper, and it carries your approval before anyone picks up a wrench, whether the phone rang at lunchtime or long after midnight.
Getting to know the building
The first time we are called to a property, the plumber walks all of it. That means finding where the water service comes in and trying every shutoff, sorting out which fixtures share a stack or a branch, recording what the kitchen line is made of, whether cast iron, ABS or clay, and what shape it is in, and locating the interceptor, each backflow assembly and all the water heaters. Next comes a gauge on the pressure regulator: LADWP calls for one wherever static pressure at the building tops 80 psi, and a regulator that has failed passes that pressure on to every flush valve and faucet. LADWP's job ends at the water meter and the gas piping past the gas meter belongs to the property, so both go in the notes. Inside the city, a seismic gas shutoff or excess flow valve is required when the gas meter is altered or replaced and before a building is sold, and the walk records whether one is there.
Those notes earn their keep at the next emergency. The plumber on that call can shut off only the part of the building that is failing and keep the rest of it open for business.
Apartment buildings and shared stacks in the Valley
Only about 46 percent of homes on the Valley side of Los Angeles are detached houses. The rest share walls, and in apartment and condo buildings they share drain lines as well. About 69 percent of Valley homes went up before 1980, so many of those buildings still drain through cast iron stacks that serve every unit above. A clog in a ground-floor kitchen can start with grease rinsed down two floors up, and a ceiling stain can trace back to a joint in the stack rather than the unit directly overhead. The camera goes into the shared line first, and the footage shows which length or branch has failed, so the owner or the association pays once, for the length that actually failed, rather than for holes cut on a hunch.
When a stack clogs over and over, the cause is seldom one dropped object. Cast iron that has carried waste since the 1960s or 1970s builds scale and rust along its whole length, and each cleaning only buys time. With the footage in hand you choose among another cleaning, a section repair and a whole new stack, going by the condition the camera recorded.